Jesus said, “You can’t serve God and money” (Matthew 6:24) What he meant was that we all have to decide what our attitude to money will be.

Whether by design or default we all have one, and because it has such a powerful influence on us it is better to be one we design.

Our up-bringing, socio-economic background, the culture of our nation, tribe and family etc all have a huge influence on our money attitude, and today it’s either working for or against us.

My parents were broke and always arguing about money.
I was raised in a culture of lack and fear of lack and we basically had a poverty mentality.

A poverty mentality is based the belief that life is riddled with lack and limitation, it is based on the fear that in order for someone to prosper someone else has to go without. We believed that we were the ones who would go without and this produced an unhealthy relationship with money and things.
Conversely, a prosperity mentality is based on the belief that the universe provides more than enough for everyone. It is a mindset that says there’s an abundant supply of everything, and it is not depleted by others taking from it.

Whatever your attitude to money, it’s basically rooted in one of those two primary belief systems. Whatever you believe about money it has and is determining how much of it you have because “as a man thinks so he is” .

Our attitude to money and people who have money directly affects the amount of money that can come to us. If you despise the well off, you’ll never be one of them because you can’t attract what you are fundamentally against. Wealthy people have bills just like the rest of us, the only difference theirs have more zeros than ours!

I’ve come to realise that if you have a problem letting money go from you, then you will have a problem with money coming to you. Proverbs 11v24-26 says, “one man gives freely yet gains even more another withholds unduly but still comes to poverty”.

It’s all about flow and keeping your life in God’s cycle of receiving and passing on. Money comes to you as it flows from you. If you’re a withholder, you’re going to end up broke because everything was designed to flourish in circulation not isolation.

Every species that ever went extinct did so because somehow it got removed from the reproductive cycle of life, so we have no more dodo’s but billions of rabbits. You have to decide if your going to be a financial dodo or a financial rabbit. Your money will go extinct unless it’s kept in circulation.

Build a generous life. Be generous with whatever you have, keep whatever money you have in some level of circulation and you will develop a healthy money attitude.

Paul Scanlon